Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) announced yesterday that it has
begun taking bids to upgrade its existing computing power and to begin work on
building the world’s fastest supercomputer.

The new supercomputer would be tasked with ensuring that the
United States
nuclear deterrent program remains operational without the need to detonate live
nukes underground to ensure they still work. “LANL currently has some of the
most limited computational capabilities of all the DOE laboratories. That will
change with this new petaflop computer, which will fill an immediate need to
increase the lab’s computing capabilities,” New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici
said.

The new supercomputer, dubbed "Roadrunner," will operate at 1
petaflop initially with the ability to scale to 2 petaflops as the project is
completed and will cost an estimated $900M USD when all is said and done.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007